Why Storytellers Love Talking Animals

From Aesop to Bugs Bunny and Orwell to Viral Videos

Aesop's The Tortoise and the Eagle — Aesop’s *The Tortoise and the Eagle*

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 11 August 2026.

Fables, fairy tales, cartoons, and viral videos are full of talking animals. Foxes flatter, lions boast, tortoises aspire to fly. For thousands of years, storytellers have preferred animals to people when telling us stories about ourselves.

A fable is a short tale featuring animals or other non-human entities—the sun, the wind, trees—and concluding with an explicit moral lesson, often expressed as a pithy maxim or saying.

The animals are anthropomorphised: they are given human qualities, especially speech and reason, and usually a vice or two. But otherwise the fable is fairly realistic, with much humbler characters and more commonplace events than legend or myth.

According to Plato, Socrates spent the days leading up to his execution putting Aesop’s fables into verse—which is all the more surprising when one considers that Socrates never wrote anything down.

Other famous collections of fables include the Buddhist Jataka Tales and the Hindu Panchatantra, and there is likely to have been some crossover between the fabulary of Greece and that of India.

For instance, there are both Greek and Indian versions of The Tortoise and the Birds, not to mention a number of African variants. Fables travel well, in both space and time: because they feature animals, they are timeless and universal. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) might be considered a modern and extended adaptation of the fable form.

Here is Aesop’s version of The Tortoise and the Birds, entitled The Tortoise and the Eagle:

A tortoise, unhappy with his lowly station, begged an eagle to teach him to fly. At last, the eagle put his reservations to one side and consented. He picked the tortoise up in his talons, carried him up to a great height, and released his grip. But instead of flying or gliding, the tortoise fell headlong to the ground and was dashed to pieces on a rock.

Moral: After vanity comes a downfall.

Similar to the fable in extrapolating from the particular to the general to extract a moral lesson is the parable, the difference between the two forms being that the parable relies on human rather than animal actors—although many fables, particularly in India, also feature humans: a brahmin, a prince, a storyteller, a merchant, an unfaithful or ungrateful wife…

The parable is especially associated with the 37 or so related by Jesus in the Gospels of Luke, Matthew, and Mark. Curiously, the Gospel of John, although it contains allegories, is not held to contain any parables. In Matthew 13, the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables to the multitudes. Jesus replies, ‘Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.’

So, why does the fable favour animal over human protagonists?

Consider this short fable by Aesop, The Fox and the Mask:

A fox broke into the house of an actor and noticed a mask in the midst of a pile of stage accessories. The fox dragged out the mask and nuzzled and swatted it for a few moments, before saying, ‘What a handsome face, pity he has no brains.’

What are the advantages here and elsewhere of preferring animal over man?

The use of animals creates new and striking possibilities. This stokes the imagination, making the tale seem more original and entertaining, even charming, without which it might fall flat as moralising or patronising.

The use of animals also enables the fabulist to isolate the vice and to caricature it, while at the same time providing a fresh perspective on it.

On a deeper level, it creates a continuum between human and animal, revealing us as a part of nature and at one with it, while also highlighting that which sets us apart from the rest of creation, namely, speech and reason (Greek, logos) and the ethical faculty (Greek, sophrosyne).

Talking animals appeal most to children, possibly because blurring the lines between human and animal is a form of pre-logical, magical thinking.

Finally, the use of animals can serve as a cover, a means of escaping censorship, or of generalising or universalising. For instance, Jean de la Fontaine (d. 1695) used the fable form to satirise French society, and Orwell to satirise communism and other forms of totalitarianism.

Animals delight us still today, every day, if only in cartoons and viral videos, because, as the fabulist might say, ‘So it is with men, too.’